Category: In Print

In Conversation with Austin Clarkson,



Austin Clarkson in front of the Konzerthaus in Berlin, where they held the week-long Wolpe Festival in September 2002.

An interview with the editor of On the Music of Stefan Wolpe: Essays and Recollections

Molly Sheridan: A number of scholars contributed essays to this collection on the music of Stefan Wolpe and quite a few years went into its preparation. What was your underlying motivation to put all of this together?

Austin Clarkson: Well, I was a student of Wolpe’s and I knew right away that he was an incredibly important person not only in my life but in many other people’s lives as well. When I came back to Toronto to teach at York University I took a larger and larger role in preserving his legacy because it had been left in a deplorable state. He had been sick for the last 10 years of his life and very few pieces had been published. He was very little known and so I gradually took charge of being general editor of his music and his writings. And now 30 years later most of his music is published and we have this first book on his music.

Molly Sheridan: Knowing Wolpe’s work as you do, I’m curious about your opinion of how America, being in America specifically and writing here, how that affected his work. In what sense is he an American composer?

Austin Clarkson: Like many Europeans who came over as refugees, basically from Hitler’s Germany, he was dislocated and had no reputation ahead of him the way Krenek and Hindemith and a couple of others had. So in his mid-30s he had to start from the ground up again. He didn’t fit in well with many Americans. He was such a brilliant personality and also a bit of a square peg in a round hole when it came to fitting into conservatories and music schools and universities here. He didn’t have a decent job until he was in his mid-50s when he got a very poor paying one at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. So he was always an outsider aesthetically in his music and also as a personality.

Molly Sheridan: As director of publications for the Stefan Wolpe Society you have edited a great deal of Wolpe’s writing and compositions. What do you think his work has to say to us today?

Austin Clarkson: It is an aesthetic of liberation combined with a strong social conscience. He was a Marxist, a kind of spiritual Marxist, not a literal Marxist, but he had that attitude–that the artist must be in service to the interests of the people. Even though his music can indeed be very, very complex, he also wrote very simple music, simple songs for people. Some of his work demands the most of the greatest musicians, but I’ve found that the greatest musicians are challenged enormously and feel greatly rewarded by his music. So it seems to have staying power, it seems to have a message for people today.

Molly Sheridan: Considering his personal politics and philosophies, as you were just saying, do you think that America was the best place for him to be working during his lifetime.

Austin Clarkson: Absolutely. In fact, I think that he blossomed in America and he indeed wanted to be known as an American composer. He was not like Hindemith who went immediately back to Europe after the war or Krenek who didn’t seem to care where he was. Wolpe was committed to the American scene and gave enormously to the younger composers who were his students. He taught students who became successful in modern jazz, in film and theater, as well as in concert music, because he was so committed to passing along his vision of music to new composers. And he had a tremendous interest in jazz. He taught a course on jazz at C.W. Post, he was intimate with many jazz musicians, and he felt that jazz had an enormous amount to contribute to concert music. So he was definitely an American composer.

Molly Sheridan: The book repeatedly mentions how the political times in which he lived affected his career, plus on a personal level, he dealt with a lack of recognition for his music and ideas, yet it seemed he was beloved by his students and that he himself remained an optimist. Since you were a student of his and have devoted a lot of yourself professionally to his work since his death, what are your personal impressions of Wolpe as a man and as a composer.

Austin Clarkson: He energized everybody in his circle and people came away from meetings and conversations with him enormously inspired. I called him a seismic event. Whenever one was in his presence it was like being in the presence of some force of nature. In interviews which I’ve done with dozens of his students, friends, and associates I’ve heard the same story time and again–that he had such a gift for seeing into people’s lives and into their gifts that he was an amazing mentor. Instead of making people depressed about how little they knew, he would give them confidence in what they did and got them going.

Molly Sheridan: As you approached other people about contributing to this book, did you find that they had similar impressions and stories of Wolpe.

Austin Clarkson: By and large yes. Some of the people who contributed to the book knew him well: his widow, the poet Hilda Morley; the art critic Dore Ashton. They knew him very well from the early ’50s when he was active in the art scene in New York. Then again, the second generation of scholars who didn’t know him seemed to be fascinated by his work and the challenges his thought presents.

Molly Sheridan: Which of his works would you most like to see get a wider hearing today? For people who are not well acquainted with his work, what should they be listening to?

Austin Clarkson: Well, I would say the best thing to do is to buy a couple of recent recordings that are an absolutely marvelous overview of a large part of his career. There is an opera CD from Decca and there is a new Bridge CD recorded by David Holzman. Then there are some chamber music CDs which are absolutely wonderful. You can find all these through the Society’s website.

Molly Sheridan: Why don’t you speak more about what the Society does to help preserve Wolpe’s legacy.

Austin Clarkson: Well, the Society was first set up to help get the music published. Now we’re working on a major compilation, a 16 CD project and we’re working on a complete critical edition of his music. We’re hoping to get funding from Canada, the U.S., Germany, and Switzerland. It’s curious that because I’m Canadian and I’ve been a scholar here now for 30 years that most of the funding for the editing of Wolpe’s music came from the Canadian government. So Canada has played a role in bringing the world of Wolpe into scholarship. Now we’re looking for people in the States to help out, because he is a national figure. He should be, because he is one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.

Molly Sheridan: What is it about his music that speaks so strongly to you?

Austin Clarkson: Well, you might call it something as basic as the life force. It’s so exciting and so amazingly unpredictable. It is so coherent and yet so unexpected. It has tremendous power. It’s like sitting in front of a painting of De Kooning or Rothko: you just know t
hat there is a great intelligence and aesthetic awareness at work.

In Conversation with Brandon LaBelle



Brandon LaBelle

An interview with the co-editor of Surface Tension: Problematics of Site

Molly Sheridan: So, let’s start with the basic background question. Can you walk me as briefly as possible through the creation of the book, from the idea to selecting content through publication? (I refer here to the evolution of ideas more than nuts and bolts construction…)

Brandon LaBelle: The idea for the book came about through informal conversations between Ken [Ehrlich] and myself, and essentially our shared relationship as artists to the legacy of site-specific practice as developed in the late-1960s. We felt that an anthology that probed this legacy, while casting a glance forward to the present so as to register how such a legacy has played out in contemporary forms of practice, beyond strictly the visual arts, was desperately needed. So, the book veers across performance, dance, sound/music, architecture and design, as well as art. In terms of selecting the specific works and contributors, this again oscillated between the historical and the contemporary—wanting to somehow initiate, within the book itself, conversations across generational, disciplinary, and geographic locations. The book intentionally spans a large territory while maintaining a central focus.

Molly Sheridan: Do you see this as an extension of earlier book projects or set up for future ones?

Brandon LaBelle: Of course, both. The earlier projects and publications (Site of Sound and Writing Aloud) focused more specifically on sound, but always with a slight bent or leaning to larger questions, whether that be of language or architecture, or more social questions regarding public space. The lingering question as to how to produce as an artist in relation to the larger world I think is the paramount concern—and what I have been interested in highlighting is that this relationship in effect is the content of work itself. Well, this is the field that I’m engaged with and the publications also look towards.

Molly Sheridan: The language used in the book seems to make it not for the uninitiated. Who is your target audience?

Brandon LaBelle: The book definitely assumes a certain knowledge or understanding of site-specific practice and certain discourse surrounding contemporary art of the last 40 years. Though I think it also aims to contaminate such discourse with other perspectives, other voices, other influences, by introducing peripheral figures and questions, geographies slightly outside the “New York School”, as well as veering into other forms of practice and writing, from the more fictional to the biographical. So, for us, I think we tried to temper the overtly theoretical with the overtly practical, the intellectual with the visceral, the academic with the vernacular, while at the same time resisting such dualities.

Molly Sheridan: One thing that struck me as soon as I picked up the book was how good it looks. A lot of times I wonder about books directed at creative people that are not visually very attractive. Was a lot of planning and effort put into that part of the book’s creation?

Brandon LaBelle: Yes, definitely! The book was designed by Louise Sandhaus, a designer based in Los Angeles, and she put a lot of energy into designing the book so as to playfully and intellectually underscore aspects of the content and editorial agenda. Plus, to simply make the book irresistibly beautiful. We also wanted to use the space of the book as a site itself by inserting a few more performative and site-specific works. In this way, the book functions as a possible space, not only for reading but for experiencing the specifics of the page.

Molly Sheridan: How did you intend the CD to work with the text?

Brandon LaBelle: The CD at times illustrates a written text, and at other times proposes sound itself as a medium that may add to the discussion around place and location, and how such things might contribute to forms of practice. So, the CD is also a kind of live event performing within the book, something to take out and play on your stereo to vibrate the air, to register place itself through sonically stirring a reader’s direct location. In this way, the CD illustrates the book in general by performing its content more actively.

Molly Sheridan: Relating site specificity directly to music/sound, can you talk a bit about some of the historical highlights?

Brandon LaBelle: The historical legacy could be taken in various directions. Certainly, the idea that music/sound functions acoustically in given spaces can be heard in a vast number of religious and spiritual contexts: the voice housed within Gothic cathedrals builds a drama of sound by raising the voice vertically, the chanting of Buddhist monks moves more horizontally through Japanese temples and trickles beyond its spatial borders and into the garden, etc. This then can certainly be elaborated in more acoustical articulations in which specific compositions or sound works are designed for given spaces, such as Stockhausen’s work for the World Expo in Osaka in 1970, or the Phillips Pavilion in 1958 designed by Le Corbusier (and Iannis Xenakis), which presented work by Edgar Varèse through a 400 channel speaker system. The specifics of space to sound is also highlighted in the legacy of musique concrète, though in a sense by blacking out space, adopting the cinematic architecture of pure illusion and no reference to outside information. From here of course we could move through a whole range of more electronic works and contemporary artists that work directly with space, architecture, and location: Maryanne Amacher’s structure-borne music, Michael Brewster’s sound installations, Alvin Lucier needs to definitely be mentioned, and methods of soundscape studies which promotes a direct understanding of sound and environment.

Molly Sheridan: In your introduction, you acknowledge that this type of art often raises more questions than answers. What types of questions do you feel it should be raising currently?

Brandon LaBelle: It could certainly ask itself: does site-specific practice actually operate according to the same terms it did 30 years ago? I think essentially the book proposes that it does not, and that one way for it to address the conditions of today is to move more radically across disciplinary borders and become more active in situations beyond art. I think that is essentially the work the book highlights and in a way promotes. To slightly contradict myself, in the broader sense it could also be asking less about itself, and more about others, particularly in terms of addressing people. I think the role people play in social and cultural productions features in much site-specific work, though I wonder at what level this could be taken further. Again, some of the work in the book certainly highlights this (WochenKlausur, < A HREF=”http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/rlh/eprlh.html” TARGET=”_blank”>Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Lize Mogel).

Molly Sheridan: What can a composer who writes principally for the concert hall and maybe has not previously considered the role site could play in his/her work take away from a reading of this book?

Brandon LaBelle: Well, obviously they might not find it of interest at all, and that would certainly be O.K. Though what might become more apparent is that their music could have an added dimension by approaching the site-specifics of a given concert hall in the writing of composition. This happens on occasion already (Stockhausen, Kagel, Xenakis, Lucier), though in general I find site-specific practice is not a terminology or concern you find in the conservatory, or even in some of the more experimental music programs. Ultimately, what might come from reading the book is the role music could play in addressing architecture, public space, and an audience in more experimental and interactive ways, so as to make music more “conversational” and less about the musical argument. I think this is something that would add to music greatly.

In conversation with Michael Cogswell



An interview with the author of Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo

Michael Cogswell was hired by Queens College in 1991 to arrange, preserve, and catalog the collections of the Louis Armstrong Archives. In 1995 the college asked him to lead the project to open the Louis Armstrong House as a museum. Mr. Cogswell has made presentations about Louis Armstrong in Washington D.C., New Orleans, San Francisco, and Europe, and he has appeared on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” ABC-TV’s Nightline, and CBS Sunday Morning.

Molly Sheridan: So, when you began this project 12 years ago, what did you walk into?

Michael Cogswell: I was hired in 1991 by Queens College to arrange, preserve, and catalogue Louis Armstrong‘s vast personal collection of reel-to-reel tapes, scrapbooks, photographs, gold records and awards, and papers and so forth that were discovered in his house. My first day at work I walked into the archival center in Rosenthal Library at Queens College and there were 72 shipping cartons of stuff stacked up and there was a chair and a desk. That was about it. I actually had to borrow a pad of paper and a pencil to begin work. But we started from there and then three years later we opened to the public as the Louis Armstrong Archives.

Molly Sheridan: Did you question your decision to take on the job when you go to work that first day?

Michael Cogswell: Oh, no. I had been there for an interview so I knew what to expect. It was actually fulfilling that we started from nothing and then three years later we had a whole six-room suite filled up with an exhibit area, reading room, and collection stacks and everything was ready to go.

Molly Sheridan: Now, you were going through a lot of his personal things, and then making that public. Did you have any reservations about that after sifting through these very personal artifacts from his life?

Michael Cogswell: No, Louis was a very public person. His letters even to fans and casual backstage acquaintances are very candid, very open. He was very open in interviews. Unfortunately he would always get asked the same questions again and again, you know, ‘How did you start playing trumpet?’ and things like that. But when good interviewers asked him penetrating questions he gave terrific answers. Louis was always very open with everybody, and there was nothing to hide. Louis was open about his music and his marriages and his marijuana use, so there was really very little that I felt was private, you know, that Louis would not want to have known. Who you saw onstage on the Ed Sullivan Show, smiling and laughing and making music and cracking jokes, that’s who he was offstage too. Maybe the only concern that would fall in this category—on some of the backstage dressing room tapes Louis and guys are sitting around swapping dirty jokes and band stories. We did have an issue on access, such as what if a 10-year-old wants to come in and listen to those tapes. What should we do? Do we put a parental advisory sticker on our service copy CDs or what? But we haven’t been faced with that yet.

Molly Sheridan: After all the work you’ve done for the archive, is there anything that sticks out in your mind that was maybe especially surprising, something you almost had to run and call someone to say, ‘You won’t believe what I found!’? Maybe in a way a lot of days were filled with little stuff like that…

Michael Cogswell: Yeah. As I said there was no great revelation. When the archives opened in 1994 reporters would ask: ‘Mr. Cogswell, after spending three years processing Louis Armstrong’s personal collection of materials, what great discovery did you make?’ And I knew what they were looking for was something like, ‘Michael Jackson is Louis Armstrong’s love child.’ And there’s nothing like that in there, but the remarkable thing about it is Louis is very real in all of these tape recordings. As far as historical information, again no big revelations, but there are lots of nuggets. Working with the spoken word tapes is like panning for gold. You may listen to 15 or 20 minutes where it’s difficult to tell what’s going on, there are three and four people talking at once, nobody is really on microphone, and then suddenly everybody will stop talking and Louis will tell a story or relate an incident. So the little nuggets are what is so valuable, and they provide a penetrating insight into the working life of a professional jazz musician, Louis’s life in particular. He tells stories about racial discrimination in the South. He tells backstage stories of who did what and who said what to whom. It’s all very, very interesting.

Molly Sheridan: I know a lot of people say that in some ways after all this work you know him better than anyone, and yet you never met him. Is that strange to you?

Michael Cogswell: Well, when Louis passed away in 1971, I had just graduated from high school and was just making my first gigs as a professional saxophonist. So I never met him. I would have liked to have met him, but fate did not play out that way. But I do feel like I’m meeting him now from my years spent working with his manuscripts and tapes and trumpets and so forth, and then also my years spent working in his house and interpreting his house to others. So it’s just the way that it has played out.

Molly Sheridan: Did you find it difficult distilling everything you knew about him into this very concise, almost coffee table book?

Michael Cogswell: No. When I began to write the book I guess like any author my fear was, ‘How am I going to fill up all these pages? I have a contract with a publisher and I have to give him X number of words. How am I ever going to do that.’ But then once it started taking shape, I had the opposite problem, you know, ‘How do I condense it?’ And you’re right, there are many, many things that I left out. I ended up writing much more than could possibly fit in the book and then I had to start editing and throwing things out to meet the required word length and that’s always difficult. I guess a good way to summarize this book is that it’s been my privilege to work with Louis’s stuff for all these years. I’ve had the privilege to give presentations about Louis in New York, Washington D.C., New Orleans, San Francisco, and Chicago and also all over the world and people have come up to me over the years and said, ‘When are you going to write a book?’ And so what I’ve done is kind of distilled a lot of my presentations and a lot of tours of the house that I’ve given to people and a lot of work I’ve done with researchers in the archive, all this experience I’ve tried to put in this little book. So you can think of the book as Michael Cogswell’s private, behind-the-scenes tour of the Louis Armstrong house and archive.

Molly Sheridan: To finish up then, let’s talk a little about the house. I know there was a big opening celebration not too long ago…

Michael Cogswell: Louis and Lucille Armstrong bought a little two-story frame house in the working class neighborhood of Corona, Queens, in 1943 and they lived there for the rest of their lives. That’s a remarkable story because the house is a very simple home and Louis, in 1943, was already a superstar and he could have
lived almost anywhere. I won’t say he was at the height of his fame, but already famous and celebrated, and he purchased this modest little home and he lived here like a regular guy. Today the house is a National Historic Landmark. It’s a New York City Landmark. Nobody has lived here since the Armstrongs. That’s another remarkable thing about this historic site. Many of my sister house museums that are 17th and 18th century houses, they had to recreate the rooms. We didn’t face that problem. This house has been frozen in time. No one has lived here since the Armstrongs, not an ashtray has been moved.

Molly Sheridan: How did that happen in New York of all places where real estate turns over so quickly?

Michael Cogswell: Well, Louis was married four times and never had any children. And his marriage to Lucille was of course the longest one and lasted for decades, the rest of their lives. After Lucille passed the administration of the Armstrong estate fell to a private foundation called the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation, which was actually formed during Louis and Lucille’s lifetime in 1969. The officers of the foundation had the good sense to know that something needed to be done to preserve this house and the contents, so they arranged for it to be given to the City of New York. The house is actually owned by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, to be administered by Queens College under a long term licensing agreement. They also gave to Queens College Louis’s vast personal collection of scrapbooks, photographs, and tapes and so forth that was discovered in closets and cupboards in the house. So if it wasn’t for their vision and also their annual grant, which is the bedrock of our annual operating budget, we wouldn’t be here as a museum today.

Molly Sheridan: I know Louis had collaged things even onto the walls of the house. One of the photographs in the book is of a wall in his den with images pasted onto it. Is that something you found throughout the house?

Michael Cogswell: No. Louis did at one time put collages on the wall of his den but Lucille thought they were in poor taste. One time when he was on tour she took them all down. So the photographs that are in the book are quite remarkable because they’re the only photographs I’ve ever been able to discover of those collages on the wall. Charlie Graham came out to interview Louis for an article about his audio equipment and he was taking pictures of Louis’s tape decks and turn table and so forth, but what he also happened to catch in the background on the wall was Louis’s collages. But also discovered in the house were 650 tape boxes, and more the 500 of those were decorated front and back with collages. Many of those are reproduced in the book and this is the first time that any publication has really shown an assortment. One or two have appeared, but no one has ever laid them out like this.

Molly Sheridan: Who was to know he was such a visual artist in addition?

Michael Cogswell: Well that’s an excellent point. I mean, we knew Louis was a trumpet player, we knew he was a vocalist, we knew he was an actor. Armstrong fans probably know he was a writer—he published two autobiographies and a dozen major magazine articles. And they might have known he was a philanthropist. But who knew he was a collage maker? This was something not generally known until Queens College started processing the collection.

Molly Sheridan: I love that you’ve also included excerpts of his writing and how it reflects his sense of a musical line, the odd capitalization to create rhythm and everything.

Michael Cogswell: Yeah, I think the key to understanding Louis’s prose is to read it out loud. You hear the emphasis, you hear the rhythm and the meter. It’s very, very musical. Even his misspellings are phonetic in nature. He’s trying to get a certain sound.

In Conversation with David Wondrich



David Wondrich

An interview with the author of Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843-1924

Molly Sheridan: So, I was reading a bio of you online and you were described as a lapsed English professor, currently a specialist on ragtime and cocktails, and that how you got to be so was a long story. So I wanted to know if you could give me a sort of short version of how you ended up a journalist with such interesting specialties…

David Wondrich: Well, in my 20s I was a college drop out and I was a rock ‘n’ roll musician, and then I went back to school in my late 20s and I ended up studying comparative literature. I finished my undergraduate degree and couldn’t find a job so I started grad school. They basically paid me to go to school, which was very nice of them, so I figured I would just study the weirdest stuff I could find because, you know, it was their dime. [laughs] I studied all kinds of ancient languages and stuff and I thought that was very fun, but when I finally got finished with that I couldn’t find a job either really. I mean, I got a job as an English professor but it wasn’t a very fun one. Meanwhile I had started, just to blow off steam, writing about music a little bit and that was the genesis of this book. It was probably about 1996 and I had written some things for a ‘zine on old jazz and stuff like that. I met somebody at a party and he said I’m an editor. Why don’t you turn it into a book? And I said ok, sure. Little did I know it wouldn’t come out until 2003, but eventually it did.

Molly Sheridan: So how much time did you actually spend working on this book then? Was it a delayed publication or were you just finishing it piece by piece?

David Wondrich: Little by little. It was a labor of love-there was no money in it. I started working on it while I was a professor and then I kind of shelved it. Meanwhile, I fell into writing about cocktails-I don’t think you can do it any other way-and I wrote a book on that for Esquire. And finally [Chicago Review Press] told me I’d better finish [Stomp and Swerve] now, so I did.

Molly Sheridan: Do you feel there’s a void in your life now that you don’t have this project?

David Wondrich: Yeah, it’s really weird. I don’t know what music to listen to. I’ve got all this really old music because I was pretty obsessive about collecting it all on CD. But I don’t know what to listen to at this point. I’m thinking Doo-Wop.

Molly Sheridan: There you go. When I read books dealing with music that most people haven’t had the chance to hear, I’m always wondering…is there any plan to put a companion CD out with this? Because I wanted to hear this music while I was reading.

David Wondrich: There is one, yeah. It just came out. You can get it at www.archeophone.com. We couldn’t get everything, but we tried to get at least some of the songs that I mention and we found a bunch of stuff that I didn’t mention that’s just as cool.

Molly Sheridan: How did you find and listen to most if this while you were researching?

David Wondrich: Well, some of the stuff is on CD reissues that I bought here and there. A lot I got collectors to burn for me or tape for me, because when I started nobody was burning anything. That was a good chunk of some of the really rare stuff. And some of it is on LP reissues, so you know it’s just here and there basically.

Molly Sheridan: Books that come out on any kind of historical music topic, they’re often written in an academic environment for fellow academics. The voice in your book is very inviting to a general reader, very conversational and filled with slang and funny asides. How did you decide to adopt that casual voice for this project? I get the impression that that’s maybe just your natural writing style…

David Wondrich: Yeah, it kind of is. When I was in academia I was writing academic stuff and I really didn’t enjoy it at all. This project was sort of about blowing off steam-let me write like I talk to my friends was the idea. The amusing thing is that this turns out to be much harder to do I think. I wish all academics would write like that. At least try to, because with most academic writing you rely on jargon and set phrases and you don’t really have to think about stuff that much. This way you kind of have to think everything over again.

Molly Sheridan: Do you think it will hurt the book at all, that people might not take it seriously?

David Wondrich: I think some people won’t, definitely. I wish everyone would take it seriously, but it had to be written the way it was. It goes with the music. This kind of comes to the reasons that I got out of academia as well, because it’s so sterile. It’s addressing a small number of people who already know what you’re writing about and I wanted to reach out to people who didn’t know this stuff. Basically I wanted to write it in American. I think a lot of music writers who write very academic stuff have sort of PhD envy. They want to sound smart so they use a lot of jargon and convoluted language.

Molly Sheridan: Being that our readership includes a lot of people who write music, what do you think that an audience like that can take away from reading about this time period and the developments that happened?

David Wondrich: I think really the most interesting thing for them about that period is really, how do I put this, is kind of the foment that was going on…If you think about ragtime for instance, which is really the heart of the book, it was a music that was in part composed. People might have improvised when they played but a lot of it was written, and it’s a sort of invigorated composed music. At the same time it’s popular and yet it’s intelligent and the composers, the people who were writing it, they were aiming at popularity. They were aiming at white popularity as much as possible, but at the same time they were trying to make the music as intelligent as possible. And I would love to see more of that kind of generosity, of that kind of reaching out. I would hope that that would be an inspiration.

Molly Sheridan: Obviously a lot of research went into this project. I’m always curious, in a situation where you’re probably digging through all sorts of old texts and recordings, what were some of the things that surprised you? Facts, anecdotes, anything…

David Wondrich: Well, in a way it’s like the whole thing surprised me because when I started out to write it I was going to start in 1917, with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and that was going to be the beginning…

Molly Sheridan: And that turned out to be almost your end date…

David Wondrich: I know! Every time I went back to it I found somebody who was doing it earlier. And you know some of these records are astounding. There’s this one that’s sort of offensive called “All Coons Look Alike to Me.” In a way it’s less offen
sive than it sounds, but it’s still offensive. But on the record the banjo is just out of control. This guy is just thrashing the hell out of it and it’s so exciting. You just can’t believe that this was on record in 1899. It just rips out of the speakers at you. And there’s a lot of stuff like that, that’s just really exciting when you hear it. I tried to get some of that on the companion CD. The one I regret that I couldn’t get is this thing called “Swim Along” which is by Will Marion Cook. He was a black composer and he also wrote Coon songs and musical theater. There’s that great interaction between composition and folk music again. But he recorded this vocal piece of his in I think 1914. It’s got to be one of the rarest records out there but it’s just amazing. You hear it and it’s like every kind of American music wrapped up in one. It totally swings. I wish I could get a copy of it for the next companion CD.

Molly Sheridan: This books often refers to the balance, or lack of, between white and black American culture. You’re obviously white. Do you think that had an impact on the book? I know you talk about even your use of the very racially-charged language of the day…

David Wondrich: It was always in my mind, put it that way. I tried not to let it stop me from saying what I thought needed to be said. It’s embarrassing to use the language and it feels wrong, but at the same time you have to talk about this kind of stuff.

Molly Sheridan: Actually what really shocked me were a few of the posters that you reproduce in the book, and the caricature of the black face; it’s stunning.

David Wondrich: I know. I tried to not whitewash over anything. I tried to make sure that kind of the savageness of it was brought up and I tried to remind people of that as much as possible while talking about it. I didn’t want to just ignore it, because then you’ll never get beyond it.

Molly Sheridan: It’s a powerful reminder. So, now the fun question. What’s your next music project that we can look forward to?

David Wondrich: That’s a good question. Well, my next project is something on the sporting life in the 19th century.

Molly Sheridan: So it sounds like you’re pretty entrenched in this time period then.

David Wondrich: I’m just really interested in it because it’s when America came together as modern America and yet it could have gone very differently. It’s really just a lot of fun. It’s much more wide open. There was a lot more individual freedom of expression of thought than there seems to be right now. But the next music one…I’d like to do something on the music from 1925 to 1931 and just really focus on that golden age of pop recording in America. That’s when everything was great.

Molly Sheridan: Was it really great, or is it really more the nostalgia that we have for it?

David Wondrich: Well, I think it was really great actually. I mean, there was some crappy pop then too, but for the first time you were getting blues and hillbilly music and jazz. They were all developing really fast and on record. Record companies were sending out field units. In my book I just stop right at the beginning of this. Over the following few years until the Depression killed the record industry they were just finding all these geniuses who had always been there but who had never been recorded before. All of the sudden it’s all on record. You’ve got Duke Ellington starting off in 1925. So it’s a really cool period for that and it would just be fun to write about. It’s very easy to be enthusiastic.

In Conversation with William C. Banfield



William Banfield

An interview with the author of Musical Landscapes In Color

AMANDA MACBLANE: It seems like you’d been thinking about this project for a long time. What was the impetus that actually got you started in bringing this book to fruition?

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Well, the lack of documentation of these artists and wanting to find out if there were other composers and if they were experiencing similar things. And then the need to find heroes and models and inspiration. The big thing for composers, or one of the things, is how to find your voice in the mix of all of the information and cultural impulses that are out there, and then the sense that when you’re doing concert music, having a map for how to bring those things into a cohesive cultural work—you know, popular music or the blues or Annie Lennox or Bartók. I mean, how do you make sense of all that? And then ethnicity as well is another issue in terms of identity. To find composers who had made these kinds of beliefs was just intriguing, and it was necessary. I think the first place I really began to search out for black composers was graduate school. I was studying with T.J. Anderson—this would have been in the 1980s, so that’s how I became exposed to the fact that there were black composers out there. Before, in all my undergraduate years nobody talked about it. So I think it all began very early on as an undergraduate in a conservatory—we never see a mention of, or the documentation of, all these composers who were around. And many of them who are in this book were in the public press in the top of the 20th century. Why didn’t I learn about these people in my education? That was always a seed for inquiry. And then when I was faced with having to make these decisions for myself and I wanted to be able to read an essay by a composer who had similar kinds of interests, so that’s when it came to mind as something I really wanted to research. And of course I came across David Baker’s The Black Composer Speaks. I think that was the real cap on it for really digging in, because at least there were 13 or so that David had done. The short answer to your question is that in graduate school, at a doctorate level, I knew I wanted to do that and I called the Press, Scarecrow Press, and I said to the acquisitions editor at the time that I was a mentee of David Baker’s (and then I started to teach at Indiana University so he was really officially then my professional academic mentor), and I wanted to begin to write this book. They were elated because they knew that by the time he had finished the book in 1978 there were at least two or three, if not four, generations of composers who had come up, and saw that there was a need to continue the documentation, and I think that’s how it all began. I started the interviews in 1992. It took 10 years to get it all together.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I’ve never read The Black Composer Speaks. You said it was published in 1978. I’m just curious, what differences did you notice speaking to the composers of these younger generations who came of age after this book was published? Did you notice any differences in their discourse compared to the composers that David Baker had spoken to?

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Sure, sure. Well, in the first book there were composers like Ulysses Kay and Undine Smith Moore. Now these were composers that were born in 1904, 1905, and someone like Hale Smith born 1925, and the youngest then was somebody like Herbie Hancock, who is now one of our seniors. He was born in 1940. So their musical consciousness was shaped by the time of the Second World War and before. The composers that I interviewed post-1960 are, of course, on a completely new historical era, so the music and the socio-political context is very different. The thing that’s pretty much the same is that black vernacular has been such an important part of so many black composers—not all, but the majority of the composers still look to black vernacular as a place. So whether you’re talking about a composer like Jonathan Holland who was born in 1974, who obviously came up with hip-hop or someone who came up in be-bop, they are both still propelled and interested in vernacular music. That’s one thing that was consistent. The other thing that was consistent was the black experience. That is, being a black artist in America and particularly the black experience of an artist who is not doing popular music, who is doing concert and classical music—being isolated is consistent throughout whatever generation. And so that was something that was the same. But things that were different would have been the things that would have impacted their social spaces across these kinds of decade lines. In the book, I outline in the book a whole list of the similarities and differences, which are really interesting. For example, most of the composers were trained in the public schools, and after the ’80s, when they made so many budget cuts and it really cut into a great source of great teachers who were in the public schools and students then who had access to many instruments. So the rise of hip-hop culture is not just coming out of this dance culture thing; there were also all of these young people who were still creative and they didn’t have instruments in schools so they created other ways to be able create. That’s a really interesting spin and I don’t think a lot of people think about that economic cuts have a lot to do with how musicians are trained.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Certainly musicians who are dependent on public schools. And a similar book 20 years from now will be really interesting, when you get to see these composers as they hit their prime—composers and musicians without that support. I think that’s going to be a really interesting thing to watch.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: And then the Internet stuff. What’s that going to do when you have all these creative people who just go onto the Internet and pull stuff together and then the creative place, pool. So it’s going to create another sensibility. So, you’re right, it’s amazing.

AMANDA MACBLANE: What really struck me about the book was the incredible diversity of work that these composers are creating. You talk to dozens of composers, and it really makes it hard to define “Black American Concert Music.” It’s just as eclectic as the concert music field in general. The discourse is really interesting because I felt that so many of these composers had such a personal, deep, and almost spiritual connection to this music, which is reflected obviously in the chapter “Spirituality, Jazz, and Popular Song.” But at the time that the Civil Rights movement was really in full force and there were a few more opportunities for African Americans in general, the mainstream in academic music rejected any romantic notion and was something that was so exclusionary—not only to African American composers but to so many composers in general—and I was just wondering how this situation has that affected the ability of black American composers to get into the inner circle of academic music and scholarship.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: You mean, that period of the ’60s?

AMANDA MACBLANE: Yeah.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Well, there are several things that come out of that. I think that they were split with their allegiances to community or the academy. When the black arts movement and the Civil Rights movement and the black power movement broke out, composers had to deal with how they were going to set up their allegiances. If they went to the academy, it meant that they were mainstream and on the team of the oppressors. That’s basically some of the rhetoric of the period. You see that through a lot of the composers who lived through this. Somebody like Olly Wil
son, who is now firmly rooted in the academy, firmly rooted in the upper-establishment as a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters. When he began to write academic music in the late-’60s and early-’70s, many in the community thought that he was turning his back on his voice because he was doing electronic music. This was at a time when electronic music and the avant-garde were really in the academy, and it turned a lot of people away. As you say, it turned a lot of college students away at the time. So it was interesting—if I’m hitting your question right—for black composers because they had to make a similar kind of adjustment too: if their music was going to incorporate some of the socio-political and radical revolutionary rhetoric of the black power and black arts movement, which was all about the brotherhood and what have you, and that was an interesting time. That’s one thing I remember and one case specifically with Olly Wilson and people like Hale Smith, who were established earlier and in a mainstream. These composers were attempting to be heard in mainstream academia, and that was at a time when you were to be a race man or a race woman—when you were to represent the best of your race when you were in the mainstream. And then all of a sudden the dynamics changed and they said, no, the mainstream is problematic, so pull away from that. Well, composers have Ph.Ds and they’re writing classical music and looking at Bach and Shostakovich. So now, what are you going to do with that? And I think a similar shift like that is happening in my generation, where we came in at a time where we were sitting on the shoulders of those guys and ladies and then the hip-hop movement comes in and the aesthetic value or qualifier is “Keepin’ it real.” It’s a very similar kind of attack against a schooled, refined thought about what black consciousness is about. And then you get this incredible surge of creative energy in hip-hop that says, this is where the beat is now. So what is a composer who is born in the midst of that do? You can’t just close your eyes and ears to all that great energy and all that creative, inventive phrasing. It affects all the composers who are called the post-Civil Rights kids—not baby-boomers—they’re a little between baby boomers and hip-hoppers, post-Civil Rights folks. They’ve had to deal with this new creative energy and they respond to it. So instead of doing spirituals—we may look at Kirk Franklin and that kind of new-age Gospel music as the religious music. It shapes your composing, and I think the difference between composers of color in general and our white colleagues is that I think our white colleagues have an advantage here to not be concerned. I think black folks, folks of color, are always concerned about what the common folks are doing and they have to respond. I think that’s a class division as well, not just a race division. If I have lots of money and I’m not concerned about the common person, I don’t have to be, and so I can write in an ivory tower and not even be concerned about what’s happening in the streets. And I think that these days it’s more difficult for most of us—whether you’re purple, polka dot, blue or green—it’s harder for us to ignore the impulses in popular culture because it’s so much more pervasive today than it was in the late-’50s.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Well, I live in a neighborhood that is predominantly African American and what’s interesting to me is I’m not sure they’re not being exposed to a lot of the music of black American composers.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: That’s right.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I mean, most of the people in my neighborhood don’t even listen to jazz and I’m just wondering, is there a black audience for this music, for your music and for the music of the people you interviewed?

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Well, you hit on one of the central dilemmas and the best answer is that these composers have decided that they are the audience as well as the creative person. They are the black people and the black community being represented there. By being there, they open the door for people to say, “Hey! Our people have been involved in creating American concert music since the beginning.” Dvorak made that statement and there were numbers of Americans at the top of the century that were sitting together, both black and white. And so, as you know, the whole American canon was developed very early on because of these interactions. And so, most of the composers feel like they’re artists and they were trained to write concert music. That is the place where concert music is being done, so they’re there to reap the benefits and share in that. And they’ll invite others in. Now, in terms of the younger generation, one of the main deterrents to the success, for any young person, is the lack of inspirational models of excellence—image and identity. So black artists of this caliber are a real shot in the arm. An example of their music is so powerful, so we are all hopeful that we will continue to work in a way that will allow a lot of young kids to see that there are other models. And it’s not just their fault; it’s the media’s fault. The media just completely hits everybody on the head and says, “That’s the role of me and this is what you want to be. This is it over here and you will pay for this. This is how much it costs.” And it drives the whole system. So these other artists, like classical composers, are basically invisible to that community. There was a time when black composers, if they weren’t getting played in the concert halls, were getting played in their churches. The black churches were the place where Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson and all those folks would go. So kids got a chance to see Paul Robeson sing the spirituals and some aria from an opera and speak Russian and the kids would say, “Wow! I want to be just like him.” Now, if the media only allows images of Ja Rule or Britney Spears, kids have less and less examples of excellence to look for. So I think the black composers can be a major component in transforming culture in that way. When I went to high school, I asked my high school teacher, “How can you be a doctor in music?” And he said, “Well, I’m a historian and I research music.” And I said, “Wow! Really?” And because of that I had that model in my mind. Young kids don’t have that as much, so you’re right. But I think this generation—my generation and composers who are younger—I think a lot of us are trying to figure out ways to tap into the impulses. So when I go into schools, when I go to do talks, I’ll play my piano concerto and say, “Can’t you hear the hip-hop kind of floating?” And the kids will go, “Oh, yeah! That’s kind of groovin’!” And then they say, “Wow! You mean I can do this too?” And so I think that’s the way. I think the older guys, the ones that are in their 60s, they’re kind of beyond that. They don’t really care about that, but I think a lot of us are feeling like we have to go into the schools and teach kids ways to be creative.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Definitely. Certainly what I notice in my neighborhood is that it’s not that people wouldn’t be open to it, but that there is so little quality exposure to it.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: And where would they hear it today? Where would you even hear jazz even? I mean, in New York, you guys are blessed.

AMANDA MACBLANE: You can’t hear jazz unless you have a lot of money.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: That’s right! I mean, Clear Channel and all these people that buy up the stuff, they only let you hear smooth jazz or only certain kinds of commercial music. I mean, you don’t get to hear anything else.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Yeah.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: When I play, high school students and college students are amazed at how much music there is out the
re. They would not be able to hear it unless they bought CDs, because there’s no radio, no T.V. It’s hitting all of us in concert music.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Definitely. I think that getting young people involved is not a color issue at all. I think it’s a general issue. Young people are not interested. Period.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: They’re just not interested.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Well, not interested only because I think, you’re right, the economic cuts in education have really had a big impact. I also grew up in the public school system, it’s where I got all of my music training, and now I read articles that they’re cutting out music and art and foreign languages from all the New York City schools and I’m sure it’s a similar story across the country. I think you’ve hit on something. It is about a personal connection. When you talk about things that really have connected you to music and have helped you connect other people to music, it has been a personal encounter. I don’t think people will go out and seek CDs on their own. But if someone’s there playing and explaining and talking, I think that’s really what the key is. It’s a lot of footwork and it’s not easy, but I think it’s the best way at this point.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: If you talk to a group of kids, you’ve got a hundred kids out there and some kids are squirming—I mean, you’ve seen these young people’s concerts—some of them are looking off, some of them have their heads down pretending like they’re just not interested. Of that hundred, any number of ideas, whether they’re able to understand why they’re responding to that personality or what the person’s playing or the sound of the music, they don’t really know how to explain what repulses them, what absolutely mystifies them, what excites them, what scares them, they know it’s something. In critical theory, I teach that the first reading is a general reading, the second reading is more interpretive, and then your third reading is really a critical reading, putting it against all you know. If they had a second exposure, then they’ll begin to say, you know, “I like Britney Spears…” or “I really like the rhythms in this hip-hop piece…” “…but it sounds a lot like that cello line in Stravinsky.” Just play The Rite of Spring and kids are groovin’ in a minute. They hear it. So if there was just a little more time… I think a lot of the symphonies are doing a great job with their educational series. I don’t know how well they do with really understanding how they can break open the kids so that they can move them. I mean, they’re at least making the attempt to do the young people’s concerts and most of them now have an educational director and educational concerts and all that, and that’s really cool, but do they really understand the question you just asked and how to address that? I don’t think so.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I don’t think so. But it’s still a new phenomenon, so give them time to develop. There was one other question that I’ve had on my mind for a long time, and I thought that you’d be an interesting person to talk to about this. My first position that I had at the Center involved listening to a lot of recordings and writing up descriptions of them. And what I thought was really interesting is that—I was listening to recordings by every American composer possible—and in my pile was music by Anthony Braxton, George Russell, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, and for some reason these recordings were funneled into the category of jazz, free jazz—in my head and in the general psyche of the public. But the way these composers talk about their music is so similar to how hardcore academic composers approach it.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Well, there you go.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I never really understood why. I got the feeling that they were funneled into this category primarily because of a superficial viewpoint.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Very superficial. Here was this avant-garde group of musicians who like the Expressionists, the Impressionists, were driven by similar kinds of impulses—breaking down the walls of harmony and looking for other means of creative expression, rhythms, sounds of a bell against the sound of a wood… And that was an impulse that could drive compositional thought. And so there was very similar experimenting that was done in the academy that was being done in the street. There was a real intellectual movement among black avant-gardists. People like Coleman, who all the people in New York, that whole crew, were going to see. So they were all driven by the same kind of avant-garde tendencies. Now, why did they just put them over to the jazz side? Could be some racial issues, some record marketing issues, but certainly if you listen to those composers, the avant-garde groups in Chicago and that whole movement with Braxton, all that stuff, you’re right, they’re a part of similar kinds of discussions. I think that one of the things that was going on was that those intellectuals were in their community. The only main difference was their base of operation. Their base of operation was their own made academies, schools, and what have you, where they were teaching kids music. The only difference I think is their cultural reference. Where the academic avant-gardes—Babbitt and all those guys—were looking at a European avant-garde, the black avant-gardists were looking at Africa. And they were looking at communal issues for music. They were avant-gardists, but they were saying this music is the depth of our being and the struggle. They were looking at different models, but their aesthetic values and their philosophical values, as they relate to music creation, were very much the same, like you said. You know the Center for Black Music Research did a book of Black American Composers and it’s got Anthony Braxton and all those folks talking about the things that they were interested in. Or at least the essayist talked about that. And you’re right. That’s a good observation that I don’t think people talk about.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And it seems to me that this music deserves equal if not more attention, just because it hasn’t gotten attention from the mainstream academy.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Isn’t that something? They’ll go and talk about the avant-garde. You can take a 20th century music class at any of these institutions… I was at the University of Michigan, and I told my teacher then, you know, “we’ve got all this other avant-garde music going.” They never listen to that! And it was the same. If you put it on and didn’t say it was a black person—this is music from the ’60s, mid-’60s—you couldn’t tell. All those orchestrations by Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, all those guys!

AMANDA MACBLANE: Yeah and I’m just wondering how we get over these preconceptions. Do you think people are poised to do that at this point?

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: I think they are. I think people have grown. I think people have to take enough time, but the moment they hear it, they get it. I think if you went to the most closed-minded music professor or student in the academy and you played them that stuff, they’d be wowed. They may not like all the cultural or social politics of the time, but they would appreciate it as really intriguing music. It’s innovative; it’s intellectually sound. The craft is there.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And it’s certainly been influential.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: If you played somebody Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, 1960, just played that for any avant-garde composer, they would be intrigued. And then told them it’s two different quartets playing simultaneously. That’s just as cool as anything that’s been don
e.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Seriously.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: And it’s like WOW!

AMANDA MACBLANE: So what’s next for you?

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: In terms of the black composers and their documentation, I’ll give you my dream. My dream is to take this book to California NewsReel, PBS—the next level should be interviews with those composers. Four died since I wrote the book, including somebody young like Tony Williams. Do you know the story of that?

AMANDA MACBLANE: No.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Tony Williams, I dedicated the book to him. He was the first one to die and then 3 others in the meantime. I finished the article for Tony Williams. He ragged on Wynton, as a lot of them did, but he really hit Wynton hard and kind of mean. He called me back and said, “You know what? Bill, I was kind of tough on Wynton. I want to take that out.” And then he wanted to work on a couple of other things, so I made those changes and then he said, “Well, I’m going to take this manuscript into the hospital. I just gotta go in for something tomorrow and I’ll make the corrections while I’m there and I’ll send them back to you.” Well, Tony Williams never came out of the hospital. He went in for gall bladder and there were complications and he died. And here’s one of the most influential drummers of all time. I mean, he was a 17 year-old prodigy with Miles Davis. Born 1940 and he just died. So I probably have in that book, that’s the last living interview with Tony Williams. But the point is, I really want to go to the next level with this, the next level being to document them in film. Make a documentary film following the history, going way back, because we have footage of the earlier composers and some of the music and some of the issues to do a piece on this work. And I don’t think it would be boring. I think it would be just as exciting as Ken Burns because it has all these elements. You’ve got people who produce hip-hop artists as well as people who write ballet.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And it’s going to go through decades of amazing history.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Yeah! I think it would be great. So I’m figuring that out. Now the next thing I want to do is a smaller number of more personal conversations with Prince, Quincy Jones…I had like 5. I already asked the Press about it. So more intimate, more contemporary, and just a smaller number… And the next thing with this book [Musical Landscapes in Color] is that they’re going to need to do a softbound cover. Because this book’s got Bobby McFerrin in it and Patrice Rushen and Herbie Hancock, and those are popular figures. So the general public would be really excited. There’s a lot of people who would just love it, but the common person who walks into a bookstore is not going to pay $70 for a book. It needs to be $22.99 and so a softback version is what I’ve been trying to get the Press to look into. And then I want to do more with contemporary artists. I want to interview Britney Spears personally and ask her specifically about artistic responsibility and representation. We don’t have enough discussion from artists talking about their art. It’s all fashion and fame.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And their relationships…

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Yeah! That’s all we hear. Just tell me about how you feel about music conception and the role that you play and how you inspire young people. Talk about that. So I really want to move the focus toward the role of the artist in contemporary society. Whether they’re doing concert music or whether they are rap artists or R&B or Rock’n’Roll. I mean, Kurt Cobain had a lot to say.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And he never really got a chance to during his life.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: And look what they made of his diaries. She [Courtney Love] got $40 million I think it was, and I mean, people were buying it.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Of course. I think there’s a hunger for it. Particularly with pop-oriented music, you’re not going to get much discussion of it at all.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: We’re not getting any discussion about it. You’re right. And these are important artists who impact our lives daily. I have a radio show called Music and Power, which we’re doing the pilot for and my first big guest is Russell Simmons. Russell Simmons is going around a lot with his billion-dollar empire doing all kinds of stuff, positive stuff! So here is a great American story. And I want to hear more from Prince. He’s older now. I work with his music director and his music director lives right across the street from Prince, and so I haven’t gone over there yet. I sent him a note a few weeks ago…but I really want to get Prince. That’s what I want to do in terms of music scholarship. As for my own artistry, I’m trying to turn back and do more work as a guitarist. My first jazz record is coming out this year. It’s like a smooth jazz, contemporary jazz record. Most of my friends—Wynton Marsalis and all of those guys, we were in school together in the ’80s—they all became jazz stars and my teacher at the time, T.J. Anderson, said, “We don’t need anymore Wynton Marsalises, we need more composers. You are talented, stay in school, and do the composing route.” And I put my aspirations to be a rock star aside and all that and stayed in and had some wonderful exposure and experiences as a concert music composer. So it allowed me to bring all of my experiences to my symphonies and operas and that’s been really rich, but now I want to spend a little time also getting out there a little more as a guitarist in jazz and playing out my voice as a jazz artist.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Definitely, it’s a part of you musically. You can’t suppress it for too long.

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: No. I know. So that’s what I’m looking forward to. I’m the director of American Cultural Studies at the University of St. Thomas and it allows me to bring a cultural perspective to music. I share the jazz music/popular music area and I also do the cultural studies side. So my whole academic thing is to look at music in the way that we looked at it in Landscapes. From whatever vantage point the artist has, to be able to talk about the importance and the role of artistry in contemporary life and to show that that’s an important impulse that we need to listen to.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Well, you’ve certainly got a lot on your plate!

WILLIAM C. BANFIELD: Too much!

In Conversation with Denise A. Seachrist



Denise A. Seachrist

An interview with the author of The Musical World of Halim El-Dabh

AMANDA MACBLANE: Like most people for whom this book is written, I was barely familiar with El-Dabh’s music but wasn’t necessarily aware of how significant he is. I was particularly surprised to find out about how much attention he was getting from the press and from the musical community during his time in New York. He was able to live as a composer in the U.S., which is not any easy task.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: He was on the brink of great fame, I’m convinced. I mean, people were talking about him, and he was, of course, a rarity because he was an Egyptian. And then when he was at that peak, he just packed up the family and went to Ethiopia and walked away from it. That’s part of the fascination too, I think.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And in many ways, that move was important because it made El-Dabh someone who was not just a composer, he also contributed so much to the legitimization of ethnomusicology and of music scholarship in general.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Absolutely.

AMANDA MACBLANE: So what drew you most to him as both a composer and as a person?

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Well, I was getting my Ph.D. at Kent State and, he was not a professor of mine, but I started the degree in ’89 and he retired—although he’s still an adjunct professor—in ’91. So I went to the retirement concert that they had and I got to know him a little bit. But I was ignorant of his significance because I was more on the musicology side than the ethnomusicology side. We really sat down and started to talk because he was going to be one of the entries in the International Dictionary of Black Composers. That came out in about ’95 and at that point, I already had my Ph.D. and I was teaching at one of the regional campuses of Kent State. So I was a brand new professor at that time and so the Chicago University Press put out this call for people who would be willing to write entries and his name was on the list. I thought to myself, well, this would be great because I need to launch my career [laughs] and he’s here. So I volunteered to write his entry and he said ‘Sure, come to my office.” And we sat down and started to talk and I looked at his scores and fell in love with the piano works and I found him so charming and engaging.

AMANDA MACBLANE: From the biography, it seems you’re not the only one to find him charming!

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: He has that charisma. He does. And he’s so open and willing to share and talk music. While I was doing this, he started dropping names without intentionally dropping names, and I became so fascinated and I said, “Halim, why hasn’t anybody written your biography?” And he laughed and said, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you’re the one to do it!” So I wrote the entry for that dictionary, and then one of our colleagues, Terry Miller, who is in the ethno department had known Halim since ’74 really encouraged me to do it. So I said to Halim, “Well, do you want to?” And he said, “If you think it’s something you would be interested in, come on over!” And so that’s how it got started, just with a series of conversations and then really interviewing him on a regular basis. Then he gave me access to the treasure trove of his life, and Halim is the kind of person who throws nothing away. It was just cluttered chaos.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Ironic, considering he moved so much!

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: I know! I can’t believe that. You’re absolutely right, because I certainly would have streamlined my life. But that was glorious.

AMANDA MACBLANE: So he obviously provided you with a lot of material.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Exactly. And then I was able to find programs that he had saved and go into the microfilm versions of The New York Times and look up the reviews, so there was a lot of tedium in that sort of thing but then just putting your hands on these little things. Like touching the letter that Eleanor Roosevelt had written to his first wife.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I loved that letter.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: I kept looking at that and saying, you know, there’s probably a presidential library that would like to have it. It’s that sort of thing.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I thought it was so telling of the times that she was so concerned about the possibility of war that she sought the advice of Eleanor Roosevelt. [laughs]

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: And I think Halim told her to do that just to quiet her down a little bit. [laughs]

AMANDA MACBLANE: Well, she certainly seemed to have had a stressful ride with Halim.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Oh, I cannot imagine. Being a woman, I think of what all she did, and he just kind of did his own thing. Once he laughed and said, “I think it was hard being married to me.” And I tried to temper it and said, “Well, you know, Halim, it’s difficult to be married in general.” But wherever life took him, he was willing to go.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Now, this is a huge question, I recognize that, but to you, what do you see as El-Dabh’s biggest contributions to scholarship? He’s a fascinating composer, but I’m also very intrigued that he found such a natural place in the education system, something that he never thought he’d be interested in.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: You’re right, that is a huge question and I don’t know if I fully have the capacity to answer that. I think that it is telling that when he did go to Ethiopia and he was immediately offered this job at what was Haile Sellassi University—I think now it’s Addis Ababa University—he realized that they weren’t teaching the students anything about Ethiopian music and he thought that that was a crime. So he felt compelled to come in to teach them—an Egyptian teaching them Ethiopian music and going into the heart of the matter and not sanitizing at all. Going into the tea houses where people were telling him not to go and wanting to make it real and find the voice of the people. The administrators at the university wanted him to teach Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, and he said, ‘Well, then hire a European and have them come in and do that.’ And I think that’s what he does. He brings this voice that is a universal voice and part of that I think is that Halim does not label himself in anyway. He’s very proud to be Egyptian; he sees himself as a black man; he sees himself as an American. I’ve had the opportunity to be with him in Europe, and he becomes very cosmopolitan and very European. He has that chameleon-like quality that I refer to in the book and so he’s able to tie everything together. So he doesn’t necessarily label himself and he doesn’t like other people to put the labels on him either. He likes to find the voice and use Western instruments but give them an African voice. And I think there’s a freedom there. He was doing things before other people were thinking of doing them…I remember when I first heard Clytemnestra, that big piece with Martha Graham, I kept thinking, why am I not teaching this? Or why am I always going back to The Rite of Spring, when this piece is evocative of so many of these rhythms and ideas?

AMANDA MACBLANE: The example that you site of Halim going to Ethiopia and teaching Ethiopian music to Ethiopians, reflects a similar problem in American academic institutions, where it is
not necessarily the norm to learn about American composers.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: I think so. We have this plethora of talent and musicians and composers and they’ve been marginalized. I went back to Egypt with Halim when he went back for the dedication of the library in Alexandria and that was fascinating because there was a symposium that they had for young Egyptian composers and they adored him. I mean, it was as if someone had said, “Here comes Beethoven.” They were really looking forward to it. They knew of him, they knew his significance, but they didn’t really have access to his music. So it was really wonderful to watch him interact with these composers who were in their 20s and 30s and 40s, sharing ideas. There was this great sense of connection and pride and that was a really wonderful thing to see.

AMANDA MACBLANE: So why does he not receive the same attention in the U.S.? I know this is a question that you attempt to answer throughout the book, but to me it seems like he was at quite a disadvantage being an immigrant yet considering himself American, and being a person of color in what historically has been a white male European domain.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Also the Arabic-ness of his name. I think of Alan Hovhaness, who was a contemporary and Halim worked with Hovhaness and they did that one concert together. I even refer to some of the Hovhaness techniques and ideas because you hear that in El-Dabh. But with Hovhaness, he had Alan for a first name [laughs] and then you have “Halim El-Dabh” and you just don’t know where to put him.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Also, he did seem to identify closely with African Americans, thinking particularly of his time at Howard University and in a time in the U.S. when everything was so divided, that was a very a risky position to take. And now having an Arabic sounding name is definitely problematic. And in addition, his personality that led him to jump quickly from one thing to the next went against the grain in a domain where obsession is revered. He would just move on.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: He never let that bother him and there’s the reference in the book with John Robb. Robb was frustrated because Halim to a certain degree was self-taught. I mean, he did go to the Sculz Music Conservatory in Cairo, but he created his own style and he admitted to me that he never liked to practice. He just like to compose and be inventive and utilize the piano in different ways; he was reaching inside and plucking the strings and beating the side of the piano and treating it as if it were a drum or a rich orchestra and dealing with the harps and the zither traditions of Africa. So when he was taking that formal composition class and he wanted to write orchestrally in full score and Robb wanted the piano reduction, Halim refused to do that. And in the heat of passion, the statement was, “Well, you’re just an African.” Halim and Robb became very close friends afterward, but Halim said that this man regretted the remark immediately, but it was already out there, and so he said, “Well, thank you. That’s the best compliment anyone has every given me and I love you for it.” And I think that’s how he’s always approached things.

AMANDA MACBLANE: He came from a family that was very well off in Egypt. He was treated incredibly well, almost to the point where I perceived that a lot of people were envious of him. He seemed to have gotten a lot of special attention.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Yes, he did, and I think over time he came to expect that and he expected people to take care of him. And he still does to a certain degree. You know, he and I are getting ready, we’re going to a symposium at the University of Cambridge and every once in a while I’ll get a phone call from him saying, “What do I need to do about this?” or “How do I get my ticket?” And he’s perfectly capable of these things, but he just likes people to take care of him. And again, he attributes that to being the youngest of nine.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And he was incredibly babied by his mother and by everyone else in the family.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: That’s right. I do think that even though he was well-treated, I’m sure a lot of those young musicians that he first met when he went to the University of New Mexico wanted to be his friend because they wanted to be his friend. I mean, he was different. He was unique. And when you’re dealing with issues of prejudice, people overcompensate by wanting to prove that they’re not. So he was kind of safe. Halim is not particularly dark-skinned, so I think that sort of plays a role too.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I’m also curious to know—you mentioned this before and I think it comes through in the book—that Halim rejects any sort of labeling of himself or his music. But a lot of times with language, writers have to depend on these labels, these short concise ways of describing things. I’m just curious to find out what difficulties you had writing about someone who really refuses to submit to limitations of language to describe who he is and what he creates. I’m sure that must have been a challenging process.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: It was and you know, it was advantageous for me to write about this man who was still living, but, on the other hand, that was sometimes problematic too, because he was always evolving. And sometimes I would find something, he would tell me something and then I would find something that would disprove his memory. You know, his memory is wonderful, but sometimes he would get the idea wrong. And it’s also hard because his music is not well-known and that is the purpose of the book. And the fact that Kent State Press worked with me to get the CD out is wonderful, because it just says it so much better than I could say it… Sometimes in order to explain the way something is, you need to compare it to something that’s very well known, and Halim doesn’t like that. He doesn’t want to be compared to Bartók for example, even though you definitely hear some in that wonderful work for piano, Mekta’ in the Art of Kita’. But he says, “No, no, no, no…Bartók is like me!” [laughs] And so that can be problematic in trying to find where he fits in.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I feel like you get a better understanding of his music because you describe the significance of these works without relying on that crutch of comparison. I think it makes him come out truly as an individual. And obviously the CD is indispensable. It’s great to listen while you’re reading, with the cues!

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Well, I’m hopeful that his works will start to be recorded now. He has so much on old reel-to-reel tapes and I’m amazed at the quality of them. So there’s a wealth of material there to be worked from.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Well, this leads me into the next area. This book in many ways is a work of advocacy. Reading it gets you excited about his music and gives you the desire to learn more. But what else needs to be done in order to get his music to the point that you think it deserves to be at in terms of saturation and preservation?

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Well, airplay would be good! I think that would be wonderful. I think this is the first book, and I there could be many other biographies that could come from this and that would be great. Halim has also been nominated for the National Medal of Art. And my understanding is that the group who makes the decision is meeting in July. I’ve been following that. I was sort of the one who got the university to make the nomination and all of the upper administration is very much behind this and then one of our state senators, Se
nator Voinovich wrote a letter of recommendation as well. And so he’s been at least nominated and now it’s up to the committee. If he does get it, it will be announced in the fall, and quite frankly, if he would get it, that would be just a wonderful thing because then more people would want to know about him. I think people are fascinated that it’s his music that’s played at the Pyramids. But you know what was frustrating for me, too, Amanda? Why didn’t Martha Graham write about him in her autobiography? I do refer to the fact that they had a falling out, but still, how could she not mention his name? There’s the story! We need an investigative reporter to find the truth.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I have a feeling that Martha Graham should not have been in charge of writing her own biography [laughter]. She seemed to have been a bit of a personality.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Well, I think that’s the case and I think that’s probably true of most autobiographies. I think that this biography is pretty sympathetic toward him. There was one review and the book was praised highly by looking at the scholarship and the research, but the only negative comment that has come into print so far, and it really isn’t much of a negative, was something like, “Seachrist seams to be less objective in dealing with his personal life.” And that’s true because packing up the first wife and the two little girls, and just dragging them hither and yon, and being in Boston and saying, “Well, I’m going to New York, if you want to come, come.” That’s tough.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Well, I kind of disagree with that critique because I think it would’ve been less “objective” had you not slipped in the things about how Mary felt in the marriage. It did affect him and the things he did, even though he continued to go on and do anything he wanted to. I thought that it was actually a very important part of the book even though, in some ways, it makes Halim seem a bit hard, a bit selfish, but I think it was something that he had to deal with in his personality and with his personal relationships. And it wasn’t just with her that he had a difficult relationship. With other people too whether it was with Martha or with Otto Luening, they were often kind of abruptly ended often by his wanderlust. And a lot of that came from his very strong personality and his ability to say, “No. This is what’s best for me.” You can’t separate the experiences of his life from his compositional output.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: And his best music is not when he reacts to something. For example, May 4th, 1970, at Kent State was a major traumatic event in the history of the United States and to him, the irony that his wife said, well, let’s take our adolescent girls to Kent and away from Washington DC which seems so disruptive and difficult, and then of course they arrive in ’69 and that happens that first year. The work that he wrote about that, Opera Flies, I don’t really think it’s his best work. He needs to address those issues, but I don’t think that’s when he’s at his best. I think his best work is when he takes Egyptian mythology and stories and gives them that voice. Those are his best works. But I think the other works are important and that’s part of his creativity too. He just wrote a piece called, it’s for heavy metal rock band, but he called it Obsessions for Oil and My Name is Peace. He has a need to make a musical commentary on these social issues, which I think is important.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I’d like to find out a little bit more about you… I know from reading your bio that you have a degree in vocal performance and in musicology. It seems you do a million things at Kent State.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Well, I am at one of our regional campuses—Kent State has 7 regional campuses. I primarily teach non-music majors, which is wonderful, because they come in with no preconceptions except they think it’s going to be an easy course and then they’re shocked when they find out that it’s a real course. But that’s what I do. But in terms of my research, my primary research deals with communal groups mainly in Pennsylvania and their music traditions, like the Shakers, the group Ephrata, and my dissertation was on an offshoot of Conrad Beissell’s Ephrata Cloister, the group at Snow Hill. I work with Moravian music and things like that. So that’s where I’ve done most of my publication. And then Halim was just a very happy accident and has taken me in directions that I never intended to go, but that’s been a joy, a real joy, and has given me a better understanding of the contemporary world that I probably would not have been aware of, and it’s really been a wonderful experience. I’ve met some really fascinating people as a result of that.

AMANDA MACBLANE: So what’s peaking your interest now?

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: I’m very fascinated by world music and that’s probably one of my most popular classes—we have a class called Music is a World Phenomenon—and so engaging with contemporary composers who are trying to mix different things and find a different way has been fascinating for me too. I’ve enjoyed that very much.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And there’s certainly a lot of them out there.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Oh, exactly. I love reading biographies and it’s really fun to put the pieces together and then try to take it back in to the more traditional music appreciation courses where we still do talk about Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, to give a new life to those composers, because I don’t just teach the music in those courses. The music is not necessarily what is important; it’s the reflective voice of the culture, and the context of the music. So I like to tie all the threads together.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And certainly when you’re teaching a class that’s rather homogenous, what better way to get them connected then to show them that the music of Bach and Beethoven in their historical context, but also remind them that there are people working here too, reflecting their culture and situation.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: I just finished teaching a summer course, and I was talking about Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Ruth Crawford. And Ruth Crawford spent about the first seven years of her life in East Liverpool, Ohio. So you mention that and then that gets people’s attention. That’s just 30 miles away.

AMANDA MACBLANE: It’s not just dead Europeans.

DENISE A. SEACHRIST: Exactly. And they forget that. They also get to see that they can travel or they can become more aware of the world. Because that’s one thing: with the news media, they’re not focused; they don’t hear about something unless the news makes it presentable. For most of the people, if you want easy news you just get such a miniscule amount and if you really want to know what’s going on in the world, you have to seek it out, and sometimes the students that I have don’t even know where to begin to look and I think that’s important.</p

In Conversation with Michael Hicks



Michael Hicks

An interview with the author of Henry Cowell, Bohemian

AMANDA MACBLANE: You have quite a diverse range of scholarship that you’ve been working on over the past several years. I noticed your first books were about Mormonism and music and sixties rock. So what led you to Henry Cowell?

MICHAEL HICKS: Well, I think it’s an interesting story. [laughs] First of all, I grew up right near Stanford, his environs. We actually heard about Henry Cowell in grade school, learning about local history. The name came up, not much about him beyond that. So I knew of him from the area and I, of course, became acquainted with his music later on, but what happened that led to the book was that I was working on an article that was in American Music. I was researching John Cage and his studies with Schoenberg, and I was at the Schoenberg Institute at USC. I was looking at various files related to Cage and I thought, well, let me look at the Cowell file. And all there was in the Cowell file was a letter of recommendation from Schoenberg about Henry Cowell, and it written on the back of it was: “Written to help Henry Cowell get out of prison.” I had never heard that he had been in prison, and so that was what got me started on trying to understand that story. Eventually, I got the court records and I talked to the prosecuting attorney, so I ended up writing an article about Cowell in prison. But the more I went into that, the more things came up in his life that were fascinating, and so I sort of left Cage behind and really got into Cowell’s life.

AMANDA MACBLANE: What made you focus on the early part of his life?

MICHAEL HICKS: All the things for which he’s best known really come from that early part and, in some ways, I was thinking along the lines of “the child is father to the man,” and it seemed to me that there was a lot to know and understand about him from the formative years. And those were the years that I felt were the least understood in some ways, and most neglected, because the prison experience had kind of obscured them, and he went as far from his California origins—at least the environment in which he grew up—as he could possibly get geographically and, to some extent, temperamentally and professionally. And I just felt that there was something about that part of California that was not really perceived by people on the East Coast, if I could put it that way. There’s just things that are peculiar to that environment that I felt I understood having grown up there that I could relate to and think about and write about that I couldn’t with respect to his post-prison years that he spent primarily in New York.

AMANDA MACBLANE: In a lot of ways, not only is it a biography of the early years of Henry Cowell’s life but also it seems to be a biography of that area of the country.

MICHAEL HICKS: Yes.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I feel that I learned not only so much about Henry Cowell, but also about this scene that was going on in the Bay Area and you’re right. Considering so many of our music schools are on the East Coast, it never really gets explained very well.

MICHAEL HICKS: I had a colleague who said, “I felt through a lot of this book that I was reading about Michael Hicks as much as Henry Cowell,” and I actually liked that comment because I think all writing is to some extent autobiographical, and I did want to convey some of the flavor that I grew up with in that area and the sociology of it all There are many people that will refer to California as though it were an adjective instead of a noun, and I think that that’s true. I think that people from California, and certainly from that area of California, feel that and want to convey it. My mother is from that area—well, not from that area, but from Southern California, and my grandmother too. There’s a whole family history, I guess. So yeah, the cultural side of it just naturally came through.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I know in your introduction you state pretty firmly that the last thing you wanted to do was write a posthumous autobiography of Henry Cowell, and I feel like a lot of biographies of composers I’ve read really do rely heavily on the materials that the composer has written. What I really enjoyed about this book is you try to get so many different perspectives on Cowell, not just how he sees himself—which the book clearly points out was not how everyone else saw him. What do you think were some of the most surprising things you found out about Henry Cowell through this approach?

MICHAEL HICKS: It’s difficult to say because I was really reading these things and researching for a long, long period of time, and, as you suggest, I didn’t really have access to a lot of his own thoughts, although he certainly wrote lots of letters to other people. All of the initial surprises had to do with the prison years and his life related to the trial, the state of sexual prosecution in California and particularly in the Bay Area of California. That was all surprising because it seems like just the opposite of the leniency that one would expect. But I think the thing that surprised me the most was that people and critics throughout his career, pretty much said a lot of the same things that I say about him and that Joscelyn Godwin said about him: that his music was very traditional in lots of its ideas. And the idea I was interested in was the idea that was articulated maybe best by Charles Seeger: that at a certain point Cowell wasn’t really interested in being a composer but in writing notes, that that was almost therapeutic for him in some way or there was a need just to be writing and getting ideas out there. But he never reached the level of refinement that many of his students and those that he inspired did through the years. So he was full of ideas. He got them out as fast as he could, but the actual musical results didn’t get the revision or refinement or development—that’s the word used most often, that the ideas are reiterated and slightly varied and so on within a piece. But it surprised me that people said that about his music from his first recital onward, and that seemed perceptive to me.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I get the feeling that it was exactly that unrefined quality that allowed people to connect to his music, which even by today’s standards can be very difficult. In many ways, had he been more refined, had he grown up somewhere where he had conservatory training, the music would probably never have come out the way it did. And secondly, I don’t think people may have felt as comfortable as they did hearing it and reacting to it if they felt that it was something above them.

MICHAEL HICKS: I agree with you. He was so direct and so spontaneous that it communicated to diverse groups of people. The earthiness and—I don’t want to say crudeness—but the matter-of-factness of his life and the almost blue-collar circles that he traveled in sometimes comes through in the music. So I do think that a lot of people relate to it in the music and I think that’s why his music really lives today with a lot of people. I’ve sent some of Cowell’s music to essentially rock-oriented writers and they just go wild over it. They just love it—the ones I’ve sent it to at least—because it speaks, it has that same sensibility, I think, that same directness, and, as you’re suggesting, unembellished quality to it. And so the “undeveloped-ness” of it really is an attractive aspect to a lot of listeners.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Especially because I do feel that people were afraid of much of what was created, particularly in the 20th century, because they were trying to listen for more than the music. They felt like they
were missing something because it was so heady, so much about systems of thought and very intellectual. I feel like it turned a lot of people away, but with Cowell’s music there’s something really intuitive about it.

MICHAEL HICKS: Well, I think too—and clusters are the embodiment of it—he loved sound, and people really respond to that because everybody knows that sound. Every child loves that sound, because it’s instinctively loveable, to splash your hands on the keys and hear that great ringing sound of all the pitches and the partials, and he didn’t feel that he needed to do a whole lot to that to present it to the world, other than to say, listen to the beauty of this sound.

AMANDA MACBLANE: He didn’t have to right an essay about it.

MICHAEL HICKS: Yeah, and people respond to that because it is, as I say, something that children have. He was very child-like in many ways and was not afraid to—and I think was one of his great triumphs and legacies—to say these things that are instinctive to children. They’re instinctive for a reason; there’s something of the essence of humanity in them. So I think clusters are the embodiment of that instinct.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I loved the story where the family gets the piano, this old piano that is never in tune. But he didn’t need anything that was perfect, because what he was striving for wasn’t anything that was perfect in a traditional sense.

MICHAEL HICKS: Very true.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Now you’d mentioned the archive a little while ago, and I know that you had handed the manuscript in right before the archive was opened. So when you went into the archive, how did that change your perspective on what you’d just completed?

MICHAEL HICKS: As I say in the “Introduction,” a lot of it just confirmed things that I had intuited. A lot of the things I saw in the archive gave me a lot more knowledge. For example, his affection for and specific attempts to emulate the music of Leo Ornstein was something that I gathered in sort of off-hand ways through other material, but it was so blatant in the archive, when reading his letters from New York and reading Lewis Terman’s account of having dinner with Cowell after he came back from New York in the fall of 1916. And then there were some things in the archive that actually stood some of the ideas I had on their heads, but just little factual matters and some dates and that sort of thing. But I think that really, for me, the wonderful thing in the archive was to just see his handwriting as a child, to be there up close with the holographic materials. You really can feel the spirit of the era, the spirit of the people involved. You know, reading things that were written from his father to him and so on, just to get a sense of the tenderness, the innocence that was so much a part of what we’ve already talked about and their approach to life in many ways. So it was really just feeling the vibes almost of that sort of contact that one can feel, even across broad distances and time, by being close to the things that actually came from someone’s hand.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Were you able to go in and refine the book at all after you’d gone into the archive?

MICHAEL HICKS: Oh, I did a lot! And there’s a lot of things cited in the book, again, especially letters from the early years, that gave wonderful quotations and just the perfect fact or example of something. And being able to tie some of these relationships in his life together in a more personal way, or reading the letters that the woman he said that he would marry, Frau Schmolke, and she certainly loved him, reading her letters to him and so on, and just seeing that side of his life, which was totally obscure in any other accounts.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I absolutely love the photographs in the middle of the book.

MICHAEL HICKS: Thank you.

AMANDA MACBLANE: There’s such a massive collection of them. I especially love the one where he’s little with the violin. He’s so disheveled.

MICHAEL HICKS: Yeah. There are some amazing photographs. I do like the photographs and I like being the first one really to present a lot of those photos. And the cover photo I especially like, because it’s an image of Cowell that’s truer to who he really was in those days as opposed to what you usually see in the textbooks when he is usually much older and has that statesman-like look to him.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I love how his feet don’t touch the ground.

MICHAEL HICKS: He’s like a leprechaun almost in that picture. I’m glad you like those because I really, really enjoyed pulling those, and those of course are all from the archive. Well, almost all of them came from the archive.

AMANDA MACBLANE: You’re a composer as well?

MICHAEL HICKS: Yes.

AMANDA MACBLANE: I guess I’m going to ask you to take your author hat off and put your composer hat on.

MICHAEL HICKS: Sure.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Tell me about your music. What are you working on and what is driving you?

MICHAEL HICKS: Well, my career has ended up being so much consumed—and happily—consumed by scholarship, I just actually have a CD that came out on the Tantara label, which is Brigham Young University’s label and it was in part sponsored by the Barlow Endowment. That CD is called Ritual Grounds. I would say that I’ve been through many phases in the music I’ve written and I am not very prolific as a writer of notes, as Cowell was—I’m sort of the opposite of Cowell in that regard [laughs]. But I usually write music with, I think, a Cowell-esque orientation in that it’s very concerned with sound and sonority and color, but all of my music has either been for solo instruments or chamber groups at this point. My most recent piece, for example, I’ll just say a couple things about it, the piece is called “Rain Tiger” and the scoring is for viola and shadow viola, which is a viola that is separated from the ensemble and is playing very quietly what the principal viola is playing and a little bit later, just a little bit after, so as though almost an echo, but a very imprecise echo. And there are bowls being played with the trilling fingertips in the background through the entirety of the piece. There’s also clarinet and cello and piano, with light gauge chains draped over the strings to give it a sort of sizzling sound, and toy piano and steel drum and maracas. So that kind of suggests the sound world. (Find out more about Michael Hicks’s new CD at the Tantara website)

AMANDA MACBLANE: Well, of course, the best way for me to grasp your music would be to hear the CD. But, the very last thing I wanted to ask is what now? The book came out last year, I’m sure you’re in the midst of a million new things, so…

MICHAEL HICKS: What now? Well, I’m writing a new piano piece, a piece for amplified piano, which amplifies and sends it into overdrive, sort of a fuzz-tone piano. I’m a guitarist initially so a lot of music I write has a guitaristic sensibility about it. And I end up doing lots of follow-ups to the previous books. I just did a thing for the American Guild of Organists convention here in Salt Lake City about Mormon musical history, a couple of sessions on that. And I’m always interested in rock and I get a lot of e-mails and inquiries of about one thing or another relating to rock
history…or Mormon musical history. [laughs] And I suppose I’ll get some about Cowell, and I have through the years. And there are so many people working on Cowell stuff, people that want to do movies on him…I actually had somebody that wanted permission to do a movie based on my article about his prison years.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Wow!

MICHAEL HICKS: They wanted to call it Behind Bars, which is their pun!

AMANDA MACBLANE: Right! [laughs]

MICHAEL HICKS: But that never happened and funding for films like that is of course pretty dicey.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Yeah, here at the American Music Center we’d all be in the front row though!

MICHAEL HICKS: Yeah, of course. So actually I’m writing lots of poetry lately. I’m studying and trying to get better at poetry, that’s something that I’ve studied through the years from time to time. So I think I’m actually in a more creative mode than a scholarly mode recently, but I do hope that people sense me as a composer, even in the scholarly work. Somebody wrote a review of the Cowell book and said it had an almost pulpish quality to it, that in the reading of it, it carried you from one adventure to the next. And I was really pleased with that, some people maybe wouldn’t be; I know some scholars wouldn’t be, but…

AMANDA MACBLANE: It does read like a novel. I feel like I gained so much from it just because it made me want to read it.

MICHAEL HICKS: Well, I’m so pleased at that, because to me every act—scholarly or not—is a creative act. So I’m always thinking about structure and flow and the things that a composer thinks about.

AMANDA MACBLANE: If only more scholars thought like you did! [laughs]

MICHAEL HICKS: Well, there’s some, but right now I think that I just overdosed so much over the years on archives. I have archives now in my office—files and files and files of things that didn’t fit in with the structure of earlier pieces of writing, so even if I was to spend my life, from a scholarly perspective, just going through those and bringing out new things, that would probably satisfy my scholarly side for some years anyway!

Wire Magazine’s Undercurrents

Sifting through the past 100 years of art music can be a formidable task, and understanding the avant-garde musical climate that exists today is nearly impossible. While Linkin Park may sell millions of albums in a few weeks, the sad truth is that many of the most memorable and significant moments in art music were fleeting, only experienced by a small group of people and often poorly documented. But since 1982, The Wire, a UK-based modern music magazine, has dedicated itself to making sense of the present musical culture by removing genre-based limits on new music: including jazz, electronica, rock, and contemporary “classical” music side-by-side. The UNDERCURRENTS series of articles, which appeared monthly in the magazine during 1999, aimed to probe deeper into issues such as technological advancement, spiritual practices, interdisciplinary art, and political movements that have had a wide-reaching effect on serious, living music.

Simply reading the table of contents is enough to get any music fan excited about reading the book and the vivid stories that are spun masterfully by some of The Wire’s core writers like David Toop, Rob Young, and Christoph Cox don’t disappoint. Each essay is packed with details, memories, and a lot of good old-fashioned name-dropping (something The Wire is famous for). A great primer for anyone who wants to nonchalantly bring up the glitch movement at dinner or feel as though they were present at the first anarchic performances of Musica Elettronica Viva, UNDERCURRENTS also has a treasure trove of information that will be valuable even to the most hardcore new music connoisseurs.

And while the authoritative voices of the essays may convince you that by the end of the book you know all there is to know about the 20th century avant-garde, editor Rob Young recognizes that these essays only scratch the surface of creating an intelligent, broad discourse about contemporary music. In response, The Wire has continued to commission similar articles as a part of their subsequent Tangents series, to continue unfolding the history. Hopefully, the future will bring a greater diversity of writers (all authors in this book are male) and certainly more female artists into the mix. After all, when talking about the significant figures and moments of 20th century music, it would be blasphemous to leave out the likes of Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Alice Coltrane, Pamela Z, Abbey Lincoln, Joni Mitchell, Frances-Marie Uitti, Janis Joplin, Diamanda Galas, Alison Knowles, Hanne Darboven, Alice Shields, Joan LaBarbara, Maria da Alvear, Carla Bley, and the younger vanguard represented by artists such as Blectum from Blechdom, Helen Mirra, and Le Tigre. We’re talking about the 20th century after all, which saw a great shift in consciousness about the role of women in politics, culture, and art. A shift that—like the invention of the phonograph or the civil rights movement, both addressed in the book—certainly broke down a lot of artistic conventions, most notably the role of woman as muse.

Despite this oversight, UNDERCURRENTS is a great introduction to some of the important trends that have affected the trajectory of music over the past century and certainly makes one hungry for more.

In Conversation with Ben Ratliff



Ben Ratliff
Photo by Jack Vartoogian

Although he grew up in a suburban household self-described as “not very musical,” Ben Ratliff, at a youthful 34, has become a respected voice in jazz and pop music criticism since he joined The New York Times staff in 1996. His love affair with recordings began at the age of 10, when he came across a Louis Armstrong record that inspired him to learn how to play along. Less than a decade later, recordings took on an added significance to his career as he became a DJ for Columbia‘s beloved WKCR college radio station. It was also during his college years, after moving from the suburbs into New York City proper, talking to musicians on air and after gigs, that he began to understand that recordings can only represent a fraction of what jazz is about.

And while Ratliff readily expounds that jazz is a live medium, he also realizes that many people in America have no choice but to learn about jazz via recordings, which has in many ways defined how this music is perceived. Making the process even more difficult, Ratliff notes that most recordings being put out by jazz musicians today serve primarily as documentation, a calling card to help get gigs. According to Ratliff, the quality of production in jazz is light years behind other genres like rock and hip-hop, yet more and more recordings are being produced. With the market flooded with mediocre recordings and less and less live performance opportunities in second and third-tier American cities, his book The New York Times Essential Guide: Jazz helps both the casual listener and the jazz aficionado navigate what can be quite a mind-boggling exploration the recorded annals of jazz history. This book tells the story of jazz through its most significant recordings and traces the many trajectories it has taken from its popular heights to the artsy reputation it holds now:

AMANDA MACBLANE: In the preface to your book, you say that most jazz musicians are “reverential toward the past.” So what have been the influences that have acted upon jazz to keep it fresh and safe from falling into the trap of nostalgic stagnation?

BEN RATLIFF: I think a whole generation of players is coming up now who are learning from new teachers who have a fresh perspective on the music. And they’re also learning a lot about the history of jazz through the Internet, which sort of democratizes everything. There’s no kind of hidden histories anymore. There’s no secret knowledge anymore. If you want to know all about Albert Ayler, there’s a 200-page biography of him on the Internet. And if you want to know all about Louis Armstrong—there’s been tons of information about him for decades now, but now it’s all there and you’re free to make your own decisions about what’s important and what’s not without two or three heavy weight critics being the only ones who can tell you. I think that’s really good.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Speaking of critics, I don’t know if you read the piece by Stanley Crouch where he refuted a lot of the praise that Dave Douglas had been getting…

BEN RATLIFF: Right. In JazzTimes.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Exactly. Basically, he wrote that white critics will always be more comfortable with a white trumpeter like Douglas even if there are many black players out there that could outplay him or compose better than him. First of all, he makes it pretty clear that race relations still figure pretty prominently in discussions about jazz.

BEN RATLIFF: Yes.

AMANDA MACBLANE: But it also kind of threw into question the role of the critic and how the critics have shaped jazz over the last several decades and I was just curious to find out what you think has been the effect of criticism on jazz, what it can do to serve jazz better, and what it’s done to not serve it so well.

BEN RATLIFF: Well, let me talk about Stanley’s thing for a minute. I mean his argument was that most jazz critics are white and middle-class and, as you said, are more comfortable enthusing about and writing about white players or black players that they feel they can condescend to than black players whose musical language they don’t feel comfortable with. Here’s what I think. There is a problem in jazz criticism which is that critics and writers want to please their editors, and editors are always looking for news and a hook and an angle. The whole record making process has changed in the last 20 years to a place where you can only make a really big splash as a jazz bandleader if you have a concept or if, let’s say, you’re playing a premiere of a new long-form composition or if you have a commission to do, something like that. These are things that jazz critics tend to be able to sink their teeth into more easily because they have an idea. They don’t just have to talk about notes and rhythm and harmony; there’s an extra-musical idea that they can talk about. Now this is kind of a European notion and it’s getting away from the black American tradition of jazz, which is less about the material and more about how the material is played. Amiri Baraka had this phrase that he wrote when he was LeRoi Jones, talking about this idea of “the changing same.” He said that the one thread that goes through so much of jazz, as well as James Brown and soul music and so on, is this idea of “the changing same,” where it’s the idea of the groove and repetition and how music in one sense just stays the same and keeps chugging along, but little things within it keep changing. Now this idea, this is really one of the glories of black American music, but that’s kind of at odds with critics can write about because where’s the concept? Where’s the theme? Where’s the hook?

AMANDA MACBLANE: Right.

BEN RATLIFF: That’s a problem. I think that jazz critics focus too much on material and not enough on actually how the music is played. And if you did an analysis of it, you might find that more white bandleaders are coming up with ideas that have more thematic hooks and ideas. You know, “This record is about X + Y,” “This record is about my homage to Z.” You know what I’m saying?

AMANDA MACBLANE: And certainly something I’ve noticed in just about any kind of art, if there is little diversity in the people who are critics or the people who are reporting on it and bringing it to the public, a lot of times there is a similar set of criteria for excellence that they hold between them. If it’s a just a bunch of middle class, white men criticizing jazz they obviously hold a similar aesthetic criterion and because they are working for similar publications so it ends up being the same ideas over and over again. But also, there’s a lot less coverage of it now.

BEN RATLIFF: Yes.

AMANDA MACBLANE: The diversity of opinions isn’t even a possibility at this point.

BEN RATLIFF: Yeah, that’s true. I think I put in my book the fact that when I started doing this [criticism
for The New York Times] regularly, which was only 7 years ago, there were usually two or three critics from daily newspapers in New York at gigs. And now usually there is only one. That’s me. That’s a pretty dire situation in terms of people never hearing about things that have happened. I think that the prevailing attitude among newspaper editors is that one time-only musical performances are pretty low on the priority list in terms of what should be covered because it happens once and it’s over and nobody can go again. If you write about it in the paper, you are just taking up space that could be better used by a service piece for the reader, where you can read about it and then go buy a ticket. My problem with that is that I do believe that jazz is essentially a live medium and this is news. This is cultural news. Cultural history. This is what has happened and anybody’s who interested in jazz would be interested to know what happened. And maybe if they have good memories, the can remember to go and see that person that’s in town.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Right.

BEN RATLIFF: But one more thing added to what I was just talking about, about themes, about how critics need a theme and a hook and everything. It’s this idea of newness, that everybody has to be doing something new. It’s a really slippery idea and a really problematic one. I love to be surprised as much as anybody else and I do think there are some people out there who are playing music that legitimately, literally sounds pretty new but I don’t think it should be the main criterion for “Is this music worthy or not?” People are sort of losing track of the fact that, you know, hearing a groove is fantastic. Hearing a musical language played at a really high level is fantastic. I mean, ultimately, who cares if it’s a long form piece about Walter Benjamin, the literary critic…you know, what I mean? I also see that the grant system weighs heavily toward jazz bandleaders that are going to do a project that is about an extra-musical concept. Like the grants are given to bandleaders who do things like make records dedicated to an obscure Italian filmmaker or something like that.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Right. [laughs]

BEN RATLIFF: And that’s all interesting, it’s all fine. If the music is good, if the bands are good, then it’s not for me to have a problem with it. But I just think there’s a sort of misunderstanding here about what jazz is and what it has been historically.

AMANDA MACBLANE: Certainly. So to get to the book, I was hoping you could tell me just a little bit about what challenges you faced creating the book and who you hope this book will be read by and how you hope it will help them.

BEN RATLIFF: Ok. Well, I’m 34 and I feel that I really want to get more people around my age interested in the music. I love all kinds of music and I can talk to friends about all different kinds of music, but it’s depressing when I’m the only person that knows about or cares anything about jazz. I want to have these conversations with people of my generation. So part of the reason for doing a book like this is just purely for advocacy, to write with some degree of excitement about great jazz records. But the other thing I wanted to do with the book is write about jazz history and various ideas that I’m attracted to in jazz history through a particular lens. I had no great desire to do a book like this, but when it was placed in front of me, I thought it would be a fun thing to do. I had in my mind the other books like this out there and I wanted to do something a little bit different. And that’s why I self-consciously chose some records that a lot of people don’t know or chose lesser-known records by really famous artists and things like that. It’s nice to give people something to talk about. Anyway, you know what I’m saying. People make all kinds of records about highfalutin concepts…

AMANDA MACBLANE: That’s true and then a lot of things fall through the cracks based on that system.

BEN RATLIFF: Yeah.

AMANDA MACBLANE: So, I guess I just wanted to wrap up by having you tell me what’s in your CD player or on your record player right now.

BEN RATLIFF: Anything? Well, the new Eric Reed album. It’s called Mercy and Grace, it’s a solo piano album of gospel music, which I think is really good. The new Greg Osby album called St. Louis Shoes. An Earl Bostic record. The new Café Tacuba album, which is genius. The new R. Kelly album, Chocolate Factory. The White Stripes: Elephant, which is really good. That’s probably about it right now.

AMANDA MACBLANE: That’s pretty eclectic though!

BEN RATLIFF: Yeah.

AMANDA MACBLANE: And you’re fortunate that this is what you can do with your life.

BEN RATLIFF: I’m kind of a thrill-seeker ultimately and I’m able to follow the pleasure principle to a really pleasing degree in this job and I get interested in things and I go down certain avenues for a while and then I change course. It’s nice, but I hate the fact that I’m always ignoring something worthwhile and the only way to get around that would be to hire 2 or 3 more critics here.

AMANDA MACBLANE: There’s just one of you though. So it’s almost impossible.

BEN RATLIFF: Yeah.

AMANDA MACBLANE: But you’ve got many more years to find out about all this music.

BEN RATLIFF: I hope so!

In Conversation with Mark Eden Horowitz



An interview with the author of Sondheim on Music: Minor Details and Major Decisions

Amanda MacBlane: I know that this book is part of a larger project that you’ve been working on at the Library of Congress and I was wondering if you could start by explaining how this book came about from the other work you’ve been doing.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Well, that’s not really true, or it’s not exactly how I would put it. Part of my job here at the Music Division is to work on both acquiring and processing special collections, which are usually the papers of either a composer or a performer. My specialty is American musical theatre so most of the collections that I’ve worked on have been those collections, and I’ve been talking with Sondheim for a long time about his papers coming to the library. He had agreed, and the plan is that they will be bequest to us. It occurred to me that in preparation for someday (hopefully many, many years in the future) when the collection comes to us, I really wanted to have some explication from him about it—when people are looking at his manuscripts, what they should know about his process and what the things meant. So that was when I applied for a grant to do these interviews and I got it and he agreed to participate. We’ve never really done anything exactly like this before and I don’t know if we’ll ever do anything exactly like this again, although a colleague now has done something similar with Roger Reynolds. I think Reynolds has also planned to give us his papers—in fact, he’s started to—and I know that my colleague has done a series of interviews with him and I think that was inspired, at least in some part, by my project. So it would be great if we could do more things like this, but I don’t know that there are a lot of musical theatre composers who require this, where it would be as fruitful as it is with Sondheim. I’ve worked on the Richard Rodgers collection here and as much as I would’ve loved the opportunity to interview him, I don’t know that he thought about the process with the same intellectuality that Sondheim does.

Amanda MacBlane: After all, we have to remember that Sondheim is a Babbitt student! He definitely has a strong base in theory.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Yeah.

Amanda MacBlane: So how did you go about preparing for these interviews?

Mark Eden Horowitz: I spent three days in New York and was given free access to his manuscripts and I went through them a box at a time and made notes and photocopies as I saw things that I was curious about. It was literally, “I wonder what that meant?” or “I think I know what that means, but I’m not sure” or things that looked interesting or surprised me—anything like that. So that was the first step, and then I came back and started organizing what I’d done and started coming up with questions. I also wrote to several people soliciting their input, people who I thought were the kind of people that I hoped that ultimately this book would serve—musical directors, conductors who specialize in musical theatre. I guess one of the surprises was that I got very little response from that. But in the end, I had about 25 pages worth of notes (mostly questions) that I took with me when we went to do the interviews, and I would spend probably an hour each morning before we started pulling the boxes and using post-its so the manuscripts would be ready as we started and so I could go as quickly as I could through the things and find them. Then I just did the interview. But I think the thing that I did best was listen. As I think I said in the intro, if he had something that he wanted to say, I would do my best not to interrupt and I would just sort of nod encouragingly and try and get him to talk as much as possible. So much of what was said had nothing to do with the questions that I prepared, or sometimes things came out of what he said or if I didn’t understand or wasn’t clear I would try to get him to clarify something. So that was the basic process. Then, when I came back to the library (there was no idea that this would be a book) but wanted to transcribe them, just because I thought it was important to have a transcription. And the more I transcribed the more I thought that this was information that would be of value to a wider range of people. My greatest hope is that it will be read by a next generation of composers who will be inspired and try different and new things because of this. Then I found a publisher and Sondheim agreed. And the best thing then was that he was wonderful at going over the transcripts and improving them.

Amanda MacBlane: Yeah, I liked all the little notes that he would write in. “After reflection, I feel that this note actually meant this.”

Mark Eden Horowitz: [laughs] Well, most of that stuff was actually at the time, most of the corrections are very specific things that, if he couldn’t remember a certain word, or just wanted to make sure that what he was saying was as clear as possible. So it was sometimes things like, “you could read these notes as _____” is what he said, and in the corrections, “You can read down these notes as _____,” just so it’s clear what direction you were going. I mean some of it was just very minute stuff like that, just to make sure that it was absolutely understandable. And I think there’s no better copyeditor in the world, he also added and deleted commas and things like that.

Amanda MacBlane: And certainly for a book that is so heavily theory-based it reads so smoothly. This book is incredibly complete in a lot of ways. For the interviews, I know that you said that you weren’t able to get to the earlier works just because of time and resource restraints, but they really are dealt with in a lot of ways. And the details on the shows you do address are incredibly rich. Now, the “Songs I wish I’d written” list is something that is really fascinating to me. Where did the list came from?

Mark Eden Horowitz: The story is actually kind of interesting. In our Coolidge Auditorium here we have quite an important concert series that has gone on for many decades and we’ve done many premieres. We did the premiere of Appalachian Spring here and, in fact, it was written specifically for our space. And as the library’s relationship with Sondheim had grown we started talking to him about the idea that we’d like to do a concert and we’d kicked around some ideas and when we were finally trying to narrow it down, we decided we wanted to do something for his 70th birthday. One of the ideas that he had initially been very responsive to was a sort of “Sondheim Introduces…” concert. It was going to present the next generation of songwriters, because we know he’s involved a lot with ASCAP and other organizations and sees things that the younger people are writing. He seemed enthusiastic at first about adding his weight behind some new people that he thought were exciting. So that was an initial idea that he was excited about, when it came time to do the 70th anniversary concert he had decided that there really weren’t enough new, young people that he was excited about to warrant a concert. So, then the idea began morphing to sort of a “desert island” concert. I mean, there’s been so people just doing Sondheim greatest hits events, and we knew that he sat through so many of those that we wanted to do something that would be more pleasurable for him, that he would enjoy. This seemed to be something that he enjoyed and he got involved and just started faxing me with some songs and I started compiling them. He was the one that came up with the title of “Songs I Wish I’d Written” and then decided to add, “at least in part,” and he was very excited about that. So, ultimately, it was a list of 55 total and we selected 15 of them for the concert. So
he would give me song titles, and I would get the information about the composer, the lyricist, what show it was, and what year it was and I made this nice listing. What was somewhat frustrating was when the article ran in The New York Times, Sondheim said, “The New York Times asked me if you could send them this list,” which I did and then they published it! So I kind of felt like they stole our thunder a little bit, but that was the source for it. And I think he in no way intends for it to be a complete list, but it’s certainly an interesting one.

Amanda MacBlane: And what choices were you most surprised by?

Mark Eden Horowitz: There were certainly songs on there that I would not have guessed at. There were some that didn’t surprise me at all. I knew he was a big Arlen fan and most of those were great songs, but some of the funnier, lighter songs I was surprised by, like Cy Coleman’s “Real Live Girl.” It just wasn’t what I would’ve associated that with him.

Amanda MacBlane: You’ve obviously been involved in many aspects of Sondheim’s work. You’re trained as a composer, right?

Mark Eden Horowitz: I was a music minor in college, I was a theatre major and I did write a couple of musicals. I mostly studied musical composition, but I regret to say that now I write very little. I think I wrote the first thing in a long time last year, so I don’t want to pretend I’m a composer, but…

Amanda MacBlane: But you certainly have the background to be able to understand this from a composer’s perspective and I am sure that you’ve looked at Sondheim’s music before.

Mark Eden Horowitz: Oh, constantly!

Amanda MacBlane: And I also know that you were involved in putting together productions of his works before you came to the Library of Congress. So after spending three days with him, what new perspectives did you gain on his work, his shows, his ideas, and how he goes about things?

Mark Eden Horowitz: I think that I always knew that there was far more thought and intellect that went into the work than most people realized, but the thing that surprised me—which is that other side of that, which I really hadn’t expected—was when he talks about the unconscious and the subconscious and how that makes things happen or puts things together. That surprised me. I knew that each of his scores had a unique sound, but the idea had not occurred to me before that, as he puts it, he lives in that one world or that one universe for a year or whatever it takes to write a score and he tries to avoid distractions. And it’s hard for him to go back and revise a show because it’s hard to get back into that world and musical language that he had been living in while he was writing it. I found that fascinating and surprising.

Amanda MacBlane: You mentioned before how a project like this might not work with other musical theatre composers, but you’ve been involved as an archivist for a number of composer collections of the biggest names in American musical theatre. Why does something like this work best with Sondheim, and what other steps have you taken with other composers.

Mark Eden Horowitz: The collection I’m working on now and which I’ve been working on now for a few years is Leonard Bernstein and that probably comes closest to what I’ve seen in Sondheim in that there really are sketches that are theoretical. I don’t know if there’s a better way to put it. For most of the other composers’ music manuscripts I’ve seen, the sketches are mainly melodic with occasional notes about harmony, but with Sondheim what seems very unusual is the amount sketching, the amount of accompaniment figure sketching, the amount of playing with ideas and concepts in the sketching. Lenny’s the only one who sort of seems to come closest to that and the surprising thing is there really isn’t that much of it in him. It’s only in certain works that I really find that there is a lot of sketching and playing with musical ideas. Most of his sketches tend to be fairly melodic based. In one of his ballets that I was just working on, there was just page after page of working with rows and with themes, things that I was surprised to see, that I had not seen much example of before in Bernstein. Most theatre composers don’t seem to think about it as intellectually. Most of the sketching—and in no way to belittle it—is just different.

Amanda MacBlane: I really like the point in the book where Sondheim points out that he’s not just the composer and the lyricist, but he also conceptualizes the entire show and he gets frustrated with lyricists and composers who don’t put the accents on words in the proper places. He is so completely involved in all of these shows. He’s really an auteur, which makes him standout in the American musical theatre tradition…So, looking to the future, do you have any more projects that you would like to work on with Sondheim’s work?

Mark Eden Horowitz: [laughs] Well, I plan to keep up with this whole list and discography. Any encounters that I have with him have always been fascinating and revealing. I am trying and hoping to get related collections, so for instance, we’ve been in discussions with Jonathan Tunick, so that hopefully his papers and manuscripts will come to the library. Actually this summer I did a series of videotaped interviews with him. But they are a different kind, so I don’t think they would work as a book, but I think they will be of interest to people who come to study Tunick, including his relationship with Sondheim. I just hope we continue to do more.

Amanda MacBlane: And of course Sondheim’s not done yet…</p